Computational Study of Elastic Buckling and Post-Buckling Strength of Steel Decks in Bending

Corrugated steel decks have been widely used throughout the world, but available research on their local elastic buckling and post-buckling strength in bending is limited. This paper presents results of a pilot numerical study of steel deck in bending performed using finite element models developed in ANSYS and validated against test data. Top flanges of the studied profiles were either flat or had longitudinal intermediate stiffeners of different sizes. Effects of boundary conditions on critical elastic buckling moment and ultimate flexural strength of the deck were studied, as well as effects of yield stress and steel material models on deck ultimate flexural strength. Deck flexural strengths obtained in this study were compared with those predicted by the direct strength method (DSM) and the effective width method incorporated into AISI S100-16. Deck flat flanges exhibited local buckling in compression. Distortional buckling of deck flanges with intermediate stiffeners had either greater or smaller capacity than local buckling depending on stiffener size and steel thickness. Post-buckling flexural strength of deck governed by local buckling increased when slenderness of flanges in compression increased. DSM in the present form is not capable of capturing the effect of the compression flange slenderness on the deck post-buckling flexural strength. The paper proposes a revision of DSM that takes into account the compression flange slenderness and results in better deck flexural strength predictions.

View content